20 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
Mohammed Rashid would like to employ a British-born imam in his Luton mosque, but limited resources and a shortage of candidates mean he has to recruit from abroad....
"We can't afford to pay our imam more than 300 pounds a week," Rashid explained as he stood in front of the mosque's well-kept, red brick facade, decorated with colourful flower baskets and topped by a minaret.
"If our young Muslims know they can earn 500 pounds in the private sector, then why are they going to work as imams?"...
There is a chronic lack of well-qualified, homegrown English-speaking imams in Britain and, even when they are available, many mosques -- funded solely by donations from local, often deprived communities -- cannot afford them.
They therefore recruit imams from abroad who accept low wages but speak poor English, preach a conservative strain of Islam and are out of touch with their worshippers.
I suspect that similar problems apply to other religions in the capitalistic west too and it is certainly an interesting hint that maybe all this talk of Islamic ghettoes is perhaps slightly overdone, after all £500/week is more than the dole and indicates that many muslims can in fact get a job. The other capitalist religion problem - the Televangelist - doesn't appear to have occured to Imams yet but I'm sure one will be along shortly.